


The Crane Wife

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: Grim Tales [5]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Conversation, Gen, Jewelry, Murder is LG Solidarity, Parallels, Post PL, This Is Fine, Trauma, Walking at night, implied hellish relationships, lowkey casual murder, mild self-mutilation, quid pro quo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 13:16:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14189757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: Gabrielle de Lioncourt, the mother of the Prince but far from the Queen Mother, has returned to the castle where she spent the worst years of her life.It's been renovated, covered, and transformed; there is so little overt similarity to what it once was.She and Louis take a walk, and talk around what lies beneath the makeover.





	The Crane Wife

**Author's Note:**

> While nothing Archive Warning-worthy is clearly discussed, much of the substance of the characters' conversation alludes to Gabrielle's past and Louis' current positions in nominally consensual relationships with deeply disturbing power dynamics and motivations.  
> Mention of miscarriage.

Since her death, Gabrielle hadn’t been one to obey a summons, or so she told herself. It was Lestat’s request she heeded, not his newfound authority, when he asked her back to the place that had killed her. A promise was still a promise. 

So here she was, back in a long-nameless castle in the mountains of Auvergne.

She felt sorry for Lestat, in a way: the descent of power and authority on one who for so long had affected the guise of “rebel” without ever fighting for a belief must be terrible, if the wildness in his familiar eyes was any sign.

Once she would have said she had no pity in her, or that it served no function. But that was before she’d walked the wilds and come to know herself and others separate from these stone halls (hidden now by sponge-painted drywall and tiled floors, thick hangings and bright lights, all intended to disguise their wretched underpinnings yet failing utterly to overwhelm her memories.)

By how rarely Lestat actually  _ spoke _ to her, perhaps he still believed her heartless. Yet he’d said he wanted her there, and Sevraine was happy reconnecting with this curated coterie of ancient companions. And so Gabrielle remained, trying not to imagine the mobs and the fires she hadn’t seen, the beatings and the poverty she’s felt too close. She ignored imagined glimpses of a musical wastrel with dark hair and wine-flushed cheeks, whose raging mind had twined with hers revoltingly until she left France.

She kept to the edges of the endless evening conversations scored by children’s arrested voices and impromptu piano. Her reputation for cold rudeness served her well, then, meaning that after the first few attempts to curry favor with the Mother of the Prince, only those who understood her actively sought her company. As usual she was alone, but far from lonely.

And in her well-lit, exposed seclusion, she watched--not just Lestat, who sparkled and flitted and buzzed with abnormal animation, but his companions, as well.

Marius skulked and mourned; the other ancients reconnected and mixed about, making up for lost time. Sevraine would explain all that, surely, at the end of each night when they retired to their own rooms. As though Gabrielle cared for gossip.

She saw Louis linger at the edges, too, careful to chat mainly with others counted as weak as himself. Often Davis would worm a small smile and a few tentative dance steps from him, or Benedict would persuade him into some examination of a book by way of his varying perspective born of centuries isolated on an island.

Louis’ eyes followed Gabrielle, at times--tracked her about the rooms of the castle where he’d been taken to live, in snowy mountains with a Marquis who owned him. He did not approach, but simply waited for her to do so or to leave him hanging; all was as others willed it, from so gracious a piece of baggage as that.

She didn’t indulge the Prince’s Consort often, for in scarcity, sweets once given create a longing for more than can be supplied.

(Her son had never learnt that, or had simply craved too deeply.)

But on occasion, she would separate from her own partner and dance a few careful steps with Louis, palm-to-palm and sexless as they both preferred.

Louis had smiled politely at first, with the mechanized, perfunctory tilt of the head she’d once known well. She had cut him to the quick for it, and he had seemed relieved to stop. In place of that practiced cordiality was quiet, merciful quiet. It was unexpectedly pleasant, and she'd wondered to herself how her son had found himself no fewer than two companions so ill-suited to his cataclysmic outbursts.    
She noted, too, that he was not the quiet creature she had met so briefly in the sound and fury of the first great genocide to come upon them (there was disappointment in her, still, not to have had time to study the implacable stone of that woman, to stand in the eye of that great hurricane). Her heart had been warmed, then, to see such pliant softness at the side of her best, brittle, enduring child. Louis, she'd thought, might last where she could not.   
She had been right, to his misfortune.

There was a delicacy to him, in his eyes and movements, which made her think of women. Not the women she knew now, fierce and bloody, natural predators all; no, this was an older similarity.

(Not like women.)

(Like  _ Ladies.) _

He reminded her of those with whom she’d grown up, in the past she’d stepped out of like her constricting dresses. Her mortal history was a snakeskin shed when she grew too great and terrible for its poor flaked confines, left musky-smelling and hollow on the path.

That past was dead, or should be, and yet. Here she was, in this place where a Marquis could lordly transport the one he desired and keep them handy.

The closer one got to him, the more the seams showed--hasty patches applied for the sake of appearances. Were he living, the tightness around his eyes and mouth would become crow’s feet and downturned lines within years.

Few dared go so close, but of course, as the one who’d birthed their ruler in another life, she was trusted. (Not liked. Never liked. She had worn through that selfsame courtesy in the marriage-bed, the canopied thing that once stood in the same chambers this helpmate now inhabited.) She was permitted all liberties, even to walk unremarked along the parapets under a clear night sky. In a way, she supposed her status was almost that of a chaperone.

What an honor.

He wore moon-sparkling jewels; Lestat never had understood just why she’d held hers so dear.

She missed Lestat, somewhere distant, and it was a strange thing to feel so while his face still smiled at them all.

The worst of it was…

There was no ranking nor qualifying it. All things were as they were, and Louis’ arm linked companionably in her own, strides matching hers as they walked. He was pleasant and witty.

And that close, that alone, every stitch in him threatened to burst.

She had never cared much for America. By the time she was able to move under her own power most of its wild, lonely places had been tamed, or would have been prohibitive for her to move through from sunrise to sunrise. But she knew enough of Louis' in-borne courtesy to be weary of it before it even began.    
"Do I try you?" he asked as she thought it, and it was only years of death that kept her composure. He claimed none of the sharpness to thoughts she and Armand shared, but too often his comments were uncanny.    
"I'm famed for my hatred of pleasantries," she said. "No one would fault you for bowing to his mother's exhausting whims."   
"I find it a pleasure to humor your whims." He looked ahead at nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing.    
She laughed. "Of course you do. The better to hide your thoughts behind."    
He smiled and said nothing.    
"Where must we go to pry an honest answer from your lips?" she asked. "I won't ask how it is with my son until then."

“Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no truths.” It was so soft, finest gossamer whisper--it could only have been spoken, for in her mind such a thing would echo far louder.

“It’s supposed to be lies,” she said, deliberately blunt, rough to his softness. Challenging or indulging? So hard to tell, when escorting this strange creature.

“Which is worse?” He raised a beringed hand to his mouth, expression almost meditative. “My lips are treacherous, these days.” The laugh that came then was cruelly merry, meant for public after the issue of a cutting remark, but Louis never did any such thing and so perhaps it had to be saved up for her.

“Come and hunt with me,” she said. “Down to the town--we’ll find where everything once lay, and you can tear a reminiscence or two from me in payment.”

He blinked, eyes wider and greener even than lovely Jesse’s had been on the Night Island, when Gabrielle had dared to reach for hair of flame and told herself the burns didn’t hurt. She’d healed, and she’d hunted, and she’d found another, better.

“Lestat would not… ” Quick, rabbit’s breath, shaking the porcelain composure of the one who had once been thought the  _ most _ dangerous, the  _ most _ vicious, and then he nodded. “I need to feed. To tell you how it is.”

(This was a line, she knew; this was a treasured act, a fetish of Louis’ protector. To watch, violating the sanctity of a private moment. But it was also an ordinary enough request for their kind, more so for one as ‘lacking’ in graces as herself.)

Once the agreement passed between them, Louis released her and began walking toward the edges of their keep, no longer nobility but predator.    
"You're going in that?" she asked, noting the glitter at his fingers and throat.   
"Ah, you're correct." He looked at himself. "I might attract unsavory sorts."    
The sparkle of his smile was a gift, and she took it as such, shucking her suit jacket as she leapt over the wall. This she knew well, and the woods rose up to greet her with welcoming arms. Louis was at home in his own way, utterly alien to her--while she stalked with the brush as her camouflage he stopped every few feet to touch the leaves and moss with reverent hands, the moon in his eyes.    
When they made it at last to the little village the town square was deserted. The streetlights gave her a lurching sense of unease, and everywhere she turned the world appeared in patchwork between memory and reality. She pressed her elbows to her thighs, sick with it, and pressed her head between clenched fists as she willed it to pass.

He was kind enough not to touch her, appearing trapped in his own head. Maybe he was: her son had shared no shortage of commentary about his great love and the ethereal world he inhabited. She’d stopped bothering to hold in her laughter some quarter-century ago as the diatribes kept coming, each a little more solidified in its woundedness against him and her and reality.

“I’m ready.” She offered no other preamble as she stood, shaking off the old memories. They meant little to her once properly sorted, but didn’t stop nipping like fleas. If she dropped her guard, they would crawl up inside her like they had with her son, and stay.

Louis seemed unbothered by it as he strolled, face attentive as if all of this were new to him even after months spent haunting that wretched castle. “Someone warned them of us,” he murmured to the empty streets, sounding amused. “Dressed in lace and brocade, we once more become the wretched beasts of the village.” 

She snorted, feeling an almost-forgotten irritation at her own “delicate” nose when the breath rushed out it. A wish to slice it off precisely to spite her awful face. “There are beasts here regardless. It’s not us alone that hunt.”

“Of course,” he replied mildly. “After all, how else would our kind sustain ourselves, if not on the vast numbers of evildoers stalking about this place each night?” The hint of irony could possibly be nothing more than a twinkle of starlight in his eye, a cloud-shadow passing over his lips. Nothing so far as reproach.

Be thankful for what you’re given, if you’ve no choice but to accept it.

She knew those steps, or someone else had, once long ago in this place.

“Does it mean something to you?” he asked.

“No.” She’d cut herself off from this place years before her death. “I have no interest in it.” 

“I hope I might convince you to indulge me, then,” he said.

“Were you hoping to hear tales of your beloved’s toddling days? Some secret tale not spelled out in print?” she laughed, thinking of how he’d hate to see his carefully composed image crack. That alone nearly made it appealing.

“We have eternity to learn from each other.” Louis’ hands had busied themselves with the bricks and mortar of nearby shops. “There’s no reason to pry and spoil it for myself.” 

That gave her a start. She thought about the man she’d met decades before, when the world was ending. He’d been quiet and shy, but sure. His eyes had devoured every scrap of information offered to him.

“You believe you have so much time…” she pressed her lips together (small lips, small mouth, ‘a kitten’s face’ her boy had said--) and breathed.

“Of course. I’ve the protection of our Prince, haven’t I?” There was an odd sparkle in his eyes, a too-wide twist to his mouth. “I’ve never been safer. Practically wrapped in cotton wool.”

Before, he’d moved like both predator and prey--a fox surrounded by wolves. Keen with the knowledge of his finitude.

Now, he sauntered down the street with the languid carelessness of a pet. Funny how he’d seemed so far from wild before.

And the way he tilted his head and smirked was all too familiar.  _ Stolen. _

Lent.

He had no crackle of blood and phlegm in his useless lungs. No pained stab and shriveling flesh to send secret assurances.

Had he, she wondered, anyone for whom he’d pawn his jewels?

“I’d prefer you spoke plainly.” Her eyes were keen, still, for the chance of a kill. She had no need to ingratiate herself into the crowd. A flash of unguarded flesh would be enough. 

“You ask for a luxury.” 

“It’s why I’m rarely wanted.” There was someone in the alley there, too far away to determine from the shake of his hand or the glint in his eye if he was sufficiently wicked. She was sufficiently hungry, and honest. 

“I’ve enjoyed having you here.” Louis’ words followed her as she walked, light on the ground in her pants and fine linen shirt. (One of the few advantages of this place was the easier option to divest herself of the long dresses common to the caves.)

She’d been surprised when Lestat had asked for her. She’d gone, because she had promised always to come to his aid. She was beginning to think she’d been a fool. As a young thing, trained to be a woman of privilege, she’d had her leash sold at the rate of a trunk of jewels and a pile of furs. Supposedly older and wiser she’d given it away, trusting that her son would hold to the last little scrap of her that hadn’t died. He’d seemed so determined to reject his sire and everything that fell under that cursed shadow. 

Well. The Marquis had been kind to her once, hadn’t he? Or he’d pretended at it, when her body could still be confined. Now it was only her will that kept her bound; her foolish sense of loyalty to the one thing she still carried with her.

The person in the alley was alone, hungry, and above all naive. Young and going to stay that way.

Humans were rarely her preference, but there was a certain piquant closeness to be had in holding one tight and feeling their life pour forth in fractured moments, clearer and yet more chaotic than any beast’s. Confused by introspections rooted in moments set apart by years.

(Sevraine favored devouring men, of course, and as so many were vile it was easy enough to find them to that order. But the pageantry of what they’d shown to Lestat in their golden home was at least half as warning; see, how we rule and violate. See how we choose.)

This one was perhaps evil, by the widening rules these fools loved; any little sin would do. This one had felt lust and stolen things, ended affairs without regret. Simple, as so many both alive and dead were.

For her it was simpler still: she was thirsty, and this was blood. It was over the moment their eyes locked.

Lestat had recorded her words as he remembered them: “I shall be a goddess to those I slay.” She half-wondered if those words had drawn Sevraine to her, made her laugh. It made Gabrielle laugh now, the smallness of it. The older she became, the more her old ambitions seemed small and pointless. There was time, such time and yet not enough, and so many more fascinating things in this world than mortals. 

And yet here she was, ensconced in pageantry for the sake of a promise no one could force her to keep. Here was her son, surrounded by ghosts as he became one himself (she could hear the Marquis’ boots down the hall, when her mind was cruel). Here was the ghost she had known not one mortal lifetime, watching her with not one unexamined word on his lips. 

“Something to say?” She wiped a trickle of blood from her chin. 

He shook his head, eyes drawn across the road to a still-lit bar. The neon was offensively bright. 

It painted his reflective skin with pink and yellow highlights, both out of place on cobbled streets and beneath crumbling arches that Gabrielle would gladly see wiped from the face of the Earth.

It wasn’t personal.

“There is someone over there. I will be back in a moment.” He sketched a tiny half-bow at her, fossilized courtesy, before turning away.

His voice sounded strangely provocative floating over his shoulder as he left: “...Unless you’d like to watch.”

She knew well enough a false offer made in confusion, and turned away instead.

The shop windows were all dark; it was a Sunday night, and though more and more those markers decayed for humans as well as vampires, there were still times and places where commerce took a moment’s rest.

The glass before her was smooth, no ripples or bubbles to it, and coated in some substance that blocked undesirable light rays. She knew better than to test such things; none would keep a vampire safe from that particular quality of sunlight which Fareed and Seth (but not Flannery, quiet mouse) babbled and talked around and refused to admit they could not explain.

It was nothing like the small, shuttered windows of shops and inns she’d seen mostly from afar.

Nothing like a memory.

Her fingernail scratched the surface almost idly, making a mark small and insignificant but undeniable as she waited.

“We should return.” Louis’ reflection was perfectly clear in the glass, a floating white face in the midst of blackness. His eyes and mouth were pits. “We’ll be missed.” 

“Do you care?” 

The mirror image blinked. The mouth thinned to pick its way stiffly through a response. “I’m certain--” 

“I remember you being easier to talk to.” She turned from the reflection to the flesh-and-blood specter. “Has my son taken that from you as well?” 

His face closed up. “I’ve come here to--for him.” His cheeks were pink, dead drunk.

_ What do you think? _ She pressed, hiding in the place where they couldn’t be reported on. It was her one significant “gift,” a sense that had eluded her while she lived. 

_ Stop _ . It was for her and not. It was for their always-watching audience. For her son, their mutual burden. 

A long silence, spoken and thought, passed between them. 

Then, he said, “I’ll answer your question, if you answer one of mine.” 

“Quid pro quo?” She’d seen a film, perhaps twenty years ago; her silken, drawling cadence was mimicked from the man in it. By how his mouth quirked, he knew it too.

It had appealed to her desire for freedom, to escape a prison of fools. It had appealed to her desire to feed and rend, and to punish.

She wondered whether Louis had watched it with her son, curled on the couch in the taxidermied corpse of the house they had once shared in New Orleans.

“Quite so. It’s been a long while since I was interviewed, after all.” There was a hoop in his ear, cheap tarnished metal piercing his flesh and carrying a scent of rapidly drying blood. Stolen, no doubt, from whatever victim had lent him such disastrous candor and sacrificial honesty. It didn’t match the Tiffany’s boxes Lestat loved to give him.

Perhaps it was taking advantage, when his fluid movement betrayed a drugged looseness, a sway hiding under their perfect balance. When the tainted blood still lingered in his mouth. But those who overindulged were fools foremost, and their own undoing. And it wasn’t as though he could blame her.

So she walked close, companionably as any two men might in the night as they talked secrets, and he leaned in, stooping his neck to hear.

“Very well. Answer: Has he taken just your words, or your thoughts, too?”

His brow crinkled and his eyes, so like Jesse’s, slid closed a moment, but his feet never lost their way on the ancient streets.

“No one has said what I am permitted to say, or to do, for that matter. There are no rules here, except for all the ones assumed. And so…”

“You play the fool.” A role he had already grown comfortable in, it seemed. Animals that bashed their heads to pieces against the bars of a cage became complacent after. 

“A great deal of nothing is expected from me. And so I take care to meet those expectations.” He grinned to himself. “I make an excellent standee, fit for the finest shop window.” His fingers plucked the fine fabric that remained against his chest, pulling threads loose. 

_ Play your role too well, and it will devour you _ . Disease had eaten her in those final years, but there had been little left that her own self-protection hadn’t already taken. She had once asked Jesse to cut her open, surgically clean, to see if her guts were a hollowed wasp’s nest. 

“My turn, then.” Bold as you please, but he still turned demurely away to ask. “Was it true? What Lestat wrote?”

“As much as what he wrote of you,” she answered. If he was going to be a coward, he’d get nothing.

To his credit, he met her challenge. “That you fantasized about humiliating them.” He’d taken care to hide his face, looking out into the dark. 

That  _ did _ surprise her, brought her up short momentarily. She returned volley to hide her discomfort: “Prurience? That’s the last thing I imagined you’d wonder about me.”

Her shoulders stiffened slightly, an old tension rising. She’d thought them alike in that way, set apart from the normal run by their mutual distaste for bodies too different from their own.

“Not about you. About all this.” He waved a hand in the direction of where their castle lurked, up the mountain and hidden by old-growth forest left to take over after the Revolution she’d missed. “I wondered if what he said you said was… real. Normal, for this sort of life.” She heard the moist sound of a swallow.

She had no obligation to him, truly. How would he ever complain she’d cheated him? No consequences, save for a broken trust.

And that person she’d been had wasted to death, after the last one to trust ran with her blessing.

“I had little to occupy myself but my books. And my thoughts.” She had hated even those by the end, all of them locked in and powerless as surely as she was. “I…”

She pursed her lips, unsure of how to explain. What to explain. That she had been the captive of a man she loathed, but once had thought of loving. That her body betrayed her again and again, distending and gushing out dead lumps of flesh--either still from their first breath or taken by winter, or worst of all too like their father. That the monotony of their penniless house pretending at grandeur had been absurd as any Italian farce, all the more so as her husband clung to it in his sainted ignorance. That she had become detached from her self, her flesh not a part of her (always an enemy but in the end a stranger) but a tool to be wielded as weapon. 

Louis, she realized, was watching her intently. 

“It was not about me, taking pleasure in those things I pictured. It was about the pain it would cause and the anger it would leave in my wake. Lestat imagined killing them... “ (And he’d been horrified by it, once upon a time.) “I imagined destroying myself, the role they kept me for. If I was not chaste, sober, and compliant, then I was not the thing that he owned.”

“But you were not,” he sketched a small, encompassing hand towards her, “yourself, either.”

She had not known herself. So what did it matter what some strangers did with another stranger’s property? There was no pleasure either in staying still or in making a spectacle of herself, but there was some satisfaction in what might come of the latter. There was wicked comedy in the idea of such lust directed toward the absurd thing that housed her, the prized cow she felt no attachment to herself. 

Dying had been akin to waking up. But she had no advice for one already dead.

“It was nothing.  _ I _ was nothing; this was merely an idea of showing them. And of course I never acted upon it.”

One of her few right choices. How much more would she have regretted walking up like livestock, and allowing a pack to fall upon her body and devour her?

“I see.” His features were a cipher she shouldn’t care enough to try and solve, and yet she felt somewhere a distant swell of pity. “Your turn, then. You asked me here for this, after all.”

She wanted to prise assurances that he would not take this in directions she hated, but instead remained quiet and considered her next clandestine question.

“What is he like? My son? What is he like, after all that has passed?” She asked at last, too simply.

He sighed like the wind.

“Your son is beautiful. Terrible. Prideful, foolish, vain and talented. Charismatic, frightened, and kind.  _ Your son _ is the great love of my life, Gabrielle.”

“All that I know,” she said. “What’s become of him?”

“I wish I knew.” 

They didn’t speak of the thing Lestat carried inside of him. There was no need to, when its grasp was said to reach inside of them all. It might well be among them now, dripping its poison into Lestat’s ear. 

“What is he, here?” She had followed him to the castle at his behest, not so long ago. She’d warned deaf ears that this was foolishness. It wasn’t superstition but sense that warned her away from these old grounds and their dead history. Ghosts were infectious. 

She wanted to be gone from here. 

“He--” Louis broke off, hustling to keep up with her sudden panicked stride. He caught her arm, and it was only her centuries of cool that preserved his hand from severing, flopping dead away like Roshamandes’. “He hasn’t harmed me.”

“No, he wouldn’t.” Lestat had committed every beating to memory, once upon a time. His cruelty had been colder, sweeter, an iron grip without hands. She had seen it then, but dismissed its power--it had melted so easily for the violinist, the corrosive cynic who brought out the brightest of her boy in spite of himself. 

She’d told herself that this one was safe to love, because his evils held nothing of his father.

“Would you like to go back?” They were slipping away from one another, Louis retreating into the mask of civility that served him so well. 

“I intend to leave.” She was surely, violently convinced that this place had shackles coming to claim her, to reach out now that they’d had a taste of the de Lioncourt blood once again. (Most unfair, because it wasn’t even  _ her _ blood,  _ her _ name.)

“I apologize if I’ve caused offense.” His eyes were wistful. Jealous. 

“You apologize. Are you  _ sorry?” _

His lips thinned as she ripped off the politeness that people in his position depended upon as an excuse for cruelty.

“I regret the error, but no. I’m not sorry for speaking.” He looked away. “I--dream of things. Hurting. Being hurt. It’s purposeless, and I worry that I’ll forget what matters.”

She turned her boots back towards that horrid castle, by way of a curving side street, and Louis moved with her.

And she relented just a touch, a foolish gift with no more purpose than a gem. “Your turn.”

She could tell from his twitch that he’d expected no further chances.

“Did having him help?” he whispered at last. “Someone you could save? Focus on, when it was… hard?”

He’d lost a child, she recalled. It seemed so distant, because she hadn’t had the chance to see.

“You’re glad to have another daughter, then?”

“No!”

She had few regrets in her new life, but she spared a small one for not having met her doomed granddaughter. Instead there was only the gaps she’d left behind. It would be like Lestat to cram new flesh into those old wounds (she wondered what this doppelganger had thought of dear departed Nicolas, or the ones who came after). 

“So you don’t count the girl as yours.” She hadn’t come to the wedding. What point was there in vows, stuffing wild creatures such as themselves into suits and playacting at ‘’til death do you part?’ 

“Rose was always taken care of,” was all he said. 

“And now she’s dead.” They did make them young, now. She couldn’t stop tripping over the little castrati trotting from concert to concert.

“That’s at least two turns.” 

“Ask, then.” They slowed the longer they walked, reaching the back gardens at a crawl.

“Do you love Sevraine?”  _ Aren’t you wary?  _

No doubt his wariness never stopped, if it extended to everyone made stronger than he. “Lestat did take the time to paint me as one incapable of love, didn’t he?” 

“He painted you as someone who didn’t give him what he wanted the way he wanted it. That’s nothing new.” His arms wrapped about his body tightly, fingers digging into his coat. The rings shone against the black wool. “Armand said I couldn’t love, long ago.”

Gabrielle watched him, smelling the hint of dried blood wafting from a man so like and unlike the ghost Lestat must hope to raise in this mausoleum.

“I love Sevraine,” she said at last. “I’ve loved--others.” Jesse, dear Jesse, sat silent and grim most nights, which was far from the worst that Gabrielle had endured from her. Too young, perhaps, that one. “It’s never the same, one to another.”

“Or at different times. I give what he wants, and I love.” He reached up and tugged at the little gold ring, tearing it free with a fresh sanguine splash, black as his coat in the moonlight. His ragged lobe hung bisected a moment before the meat knit itself together as though never touched. “Do you want this? I musn’t wear it inside.”

She didn’t, but she held her hand out anyway. It was a nonexistent weight in her palm, too dull to glint when she shoved the point through her right ear. It would be out of place against the just-so gaudiness of the court, a microscopic fly in the ointment. 

“You’ll have to decide.” They were at the gate. “Or lose the will to do so.” 

“Thank you for accompanying me.” He bowed, as if it really had been no more than a walk around the gardens. “You’ll always be welcome here.” 

She laughed at that, and went inside still laughing. Poor ghost. Cold comfort, to know that she was not as heartless as they painted her: she pitied him, or found him pitiable, his still-clinging love most of all. Maybe it was her own past mistakes that allowed her that indulgence, or maybe it was those echoes that inclined her to sneer at him. To press on him all the things she wished she’d done sooner.

She drifted through the old, cold halls full of dead things, staying to the edges of the music and revelry. She blinded herself to ghosts and echoes. A different kind of music dogged her steps, vanishing every time she turned to look for it, and the cowardice of it all was becoming more than she could stand.


End file.
